Common scca.com regional web sites?

A 20% region take rate would be excellent, and a sizable cash flow for an enterprise in whatever form it would take, with national blessing or not. There's no reason why we can't strive for excellent based on past performance.

I've been a SCCA member since people really used the web for anything, and it's always been an area needing more focus. It's the year 2012, and some of us are still stuck figuring out how to get a date posted on a local web site in a timely manner. This discussion shouldn't even have to happen.

Our region is small (probably 70 people, including those on family memberships) and every iteration of our web site has been created and maintained by someone who is no longer active in the club. Four, possibly five web "gurus" in the last decade. Turnover like that acts against continuity.

We don't have a free or low-cost handshake with a service provider or web designer. No one in our region does that. We pay domain and hosting fees out of our treasury, and have to muddle through everything ourselves to hang our shingle on the web. I'm sure the guy stuck updating things now would love to make it less hands-on. I know the rest of the board and regional volunteers think the same way. We would be delighted to spend the same amount for more and better.

If big regions have a honey formula that works and want to keep on trucking, more power to them. They don't serve our population or provide our resources, though. We still have to provide our geographical area the same compelling experience (published, safe, fun, legally-sanctioned, well-organized, etc.), but with a fraction of the people. Prospective members have a minimum expectation when they get directed towards our region's web site via scca.com.

I'm betting that at least one in five regions has a similar experience with overstretched volunteers trying to keep an online presence, and would be open to pooling money and talent to achive a more desirable result.

Does anyone have an idea other than "keep sucking, don't bother?"

Insufficient national office staffing to run web operations is a compelling reason not to tackle such a project. What isn't: how it relates to the traditions of a club that started 50 years before most of its members had even seen the internet.

The lifeblood of the club is grassroots-level organization at the regional level, and in this age online presence is critical to attracting and maintaining participants. No one joins or pays dues in a vacuum, nor do they care about club structure or tradition if the local region's web site looks like Geocities circa 1997, updated circa 2003. Those of us at the regional level bust a lot of hump to make things happen, and babysitting a website is tough priority for overworked regional volunteers.

We have SCCA group rates on hotels and rental cars, and major ties to companies like Volkswagen, Tire Rack, and MotorsportsReg. Certainly a major entity like the SCCA could broker with a third party to give requesting regions the web design and function they need at a better level of cost and effort than if dozens of regions tried to reinvent the wheel on their own with no common quality, content maintainability, or design language.